When Phileppe Halsman's "Jump Book" was re-printed in the 1980s I didn't pay much attention. There's a lot of gimmick books out there and this didn't seem to be any different. Now that some time has passed I could kick myself for not buying it. All those wrinkled suits are funny!
I don't know about you but I LOVE wrinkles..as long as they're somebody else's! It's funny when you see someone who had to dress fast stuck with wearing a shirt that's wrinkled on one side or a jacket with flaps that just won't stay down. Or what about the suit jackets that work their way up as if the wearer had an invisible set of shoulder pads on? Suits have a life of their own. We wear them but we don't own them. We're just their means of locomotion. Maybe the all time best suit wrinkles in animation were in the the kissing sequence in "Coal Black." Scribner must have had wrinkled people pose for him. Why aren't there more cartoon scenes like that? Every cartoonist should study wrinkles with the same determination that he studies old stand-bys like male breasts and nose hairs.
These are terrible sketches but I'll put them up anyway because I got a great idea while drawing them! What if cartoon characters walked around wearing wrinkled clothes? It would at least make a great sequence wouldn't it?...or maybe not. (Groan!) I need to get some sleep.
Yeah, you're really on to something here.
ReplyDeleteI, too, don't see many wrinkled clothes.
Only other one I'm familiar with is Jeff MacNelly's "Shoe". One of the characters, Cosmo Fishhawk, wears a wrinkled overcoat. (for examples, track down the original MacNelly strips and not the new ones drawn by his assistants)
That would be funny if they were somehow stuck that way. That would be the opposite of your starched underwear, no? AHAHAHA!
ReplyDeleteGood idea Eddie, but would this be practical for an animator?
ReplyDeleteya see, the thing about rap music is.. KIDDING!I find wrinkles are very hard to pull off in animation, you have to put a ton of thought into them, the tension/compression, track them painstakingly on inbetweens, and they tend to break up the rhythm of your drawing. Other than a few stylized blips at the joints, It's hard to pull it off appealingly.Show some cartoon cloth theories PLEASE!!
ReplyDeleteHey Eddie - don't forget: Ultimate Fighting Night at my house: 7 PM tomorrow night (Saturday)
ReplyDeleteBeer, punching and cartoons. And girls.
Life is good.
Mike
Hey Eddie - don't forget: Ultimate Fighting Night at my house: 7 PM tomorrow night (Saturday)
ReplyDeleteBeer, punching and cartoons. And girls.
Life is good.
Mike
HA! i like your drawings, the snobby hand gestures you added and the silly dance hands! ha!!
ReplyDeleteI really like when fabric looks really stupid, and tight in weird areas. like when a skinny kid wears a tight shirt and the armpits are painfully tight with a million small wrinkles .... or when a fat guy wears baggy trousers yet most if it is stuffed into his butt crack by accident.
Bob Camp had an amazing grasp of wrinkles. I still like looking at the collection of legs and feet gathered around Mr.Horse in Firedogs 1.
ReplyDeleteHis parody of Blade Runner in Crazy magazine is worth a look up.
vincent
Hank Ketcham and Earl O. Hurst for folds and wrinkles!
ReplyDeletehahah these are great drawings! not terrible at all. like other people said before, it would take LOTs of time to animate wrinkles successfully, but they definitely would be great gags. Mose designs don't even show any wrinkles anymore as if the characters were wearing skin-tight clothes, but i think wrinkles add more dimension and volume.
ReplyDeleteOY! Clothing wrinkles. My brain sweats just thinking about drawing them.
ReplyDeleteBut, sometimes they have to be done. Kind of like Gemmill said, they can't be wearing spandex all the time. ;)
Hi, Eddie -- Russ D. here, an old pal from "Rock 'n' Roll Hotel," a project that we worked on together back in the early 80s.
ReplyDeleteI think I broke your heart one morning in New York when, after days of madly sketching a terrific storyboard for the film, you showed me your work. The scenes I'd written revolved around a raccoon and a bunch of kids. That's why I hated to break the news to you.
"Um, Eddie...raccoons have got bushy, ringed tails and a black band around the eyes, like the Beagle Boys. That isn't a raccoon you're drawing...it's a beaver."
After days of drawing paddle-tails, buck teeth and paunchy stomachs, it had never dawned on you that you had your basic beaver goin' there. Personally, I think the joy you got out of drawing beavers is what blinded you. Without question, as a cartoonist there's more to work with when drawing a beaver vis a vis a raccoon.
Since those days, I've always been a follower of your career. Many times, I'd be flipping through cartoons on Saturday mornings when a particular bit of business -- a posture, an expression, a character exit -- would make me stop and say, "That's gotta be Eddie!" I'd wait for the end credits and -- sure enough -- your name would come whizzing by. (Evelyn Wood herself couldn't keep up with the speed-reading required to decipher the roll of names during the end credits of a typical Saturday morning cartoon.)
With the advent of the web, I've been able to keep track of your work. And now, with your website (which I found via Funny Cute) it's great to have a comprehensive look at your approach to cartooning and other subjects.
The things I remember most about you, Eddie, were your intelligence and the enthusiastic enjoyment you brought to every endeavor, not just cartooning. Your website certainly reflects those qualities, so keep it up!
Russ: Holy cow! How are you!? Wasn't that a fun job? I loved running around the empty hotel in Richmond! I wonder what happened to Richard, the director. Did he make more films?
ReplyDeleteI went to your site which is a plug for a book you wrote called "The Heart Attack Germ." That's a great name for a book! Has it sold well?
Marlo: Armpit stretch wrinkles are definitely interesting. I like the horizontal wrinkle that some mens' pants develop just below the crotch.
Jenny, Vincent: Hurst!? A wrinkle man? I'll look out for it. Ditto Bob's wrinkles.
Nico: Good to hear from you again!
Ryan,Murray,David: I think I can picture a simplified wrinkle design. I'll try to draw it.
The crisp pleat in animation? I would argue that some Disney stuff in the 40s through the sixties had it. The dad in 101 dalmations, the fifties Goofy and Micky wear cuffed pants era. So it can fit into character design without hampering animation.
ReplyDeleteIf you want to hang something on the nine old men, hang your clothes on them.
Some UPA stuff might have done the same.
But funny wrinkles, and crumples? Hmm, the immediate image that comes to mind, Clampett I think, is when Elmer Fudd is introducing (a fantasia parody perhaps?) an orchestra or something maybe, and he is wearing large glasses, baggy pants on suspenders, and the dickie that wouldn't stay down, that kept rolling up and hitting him in the face.
Arguably, DePatie Frelengs Inspector (clouseau to the panther) may have had an ill fitting trench coat. There are other trench coats out there in cartoon land.
I'm doing fine, Eddie. How's the book doing? Well, I haven't sold enough copies to quit writing, yet. Check out this page to see what I've been up to this year...
ReplyDeletehttp://www.afrscreenwriting.com
I have a notion to do a blog of my own, but I haven't committed to it yet. If I do, I'll try and find some pix of New York and Richmond and post them. I don't think I've got one of you, however, which is too bad.
The director? I think he went on to make one other movie and that's it.
I knew our film was in trouble when, three days before shooting began, he was walking around with a book under his arm titled "The Sayings of Gandhi." Not the sort of thing you want to be reading before shooting a 3-D rock 'n' roll teenage exploitation movie!
Good wrinkles are something I've never graduated to.
ReplyDeleteStandard,formulized hair-bunches and such are one of the early promotions you get in your drawings as an animator- I can remember being really pleased when I realized in my first year or so in the biz that I could draw those cliche hair bunches and so forth (the length- formula seems to be like human fingers- long, longer, shorter, shorter; they also taught me: banana bunches for Bluth, but we do sharp points here at Disney).
And of course I can draw easy, level one cliche wrinkles, but I've never graduated to really good believable funny wrinkles or dramatic wrinkles.
Agree on Ketcham as a great wrinkle man; Caniff drew good stylized dramatic wrinkles. Jack Hamm is the only guy to get into wrinkle-drawing in a book.
Real artists call it "drapery"...
Eddie, I still love the way you draw- your quick sketches still humble me. No matter how much I sweat, curse, erase, and re-trace, I could never capture that damned spontaneity of yours...
Also, hey to Nico, since I'm listening to the first Velvet Underground album as I type.
ReplyDeleteRuss: Congrats on the award! Why not give me a call if you're ever in L.A.?
ReplyDeleteEddie -- I had to leave town for most of the 90s, but I'm back for good, now.
ReplyDeleteIf you'd like to exchange numbers, send me an email at the webmaster link at http://theheartattackgerm.com/contact.htm
In the meantime, here's a bit of news about R 'n' R Hotel you may not have known. The negative is lost!
A friend of mine sent me a clipping many years ago from one of the trades. The producers had the negative stored at either a lab or a film vault somewhere, and it got misplaced/stolen. The producers were suing the facility -- quite likely the only way they would ever make money on the thing.
As I think about it, it's propbably best for everyone that the film is lost. It joins the ranks of missing footage films like Greed, The Magnificent Ambersons and Lost Horizon -- who's to say it wasn't a comic masterpiece...not me!
Next, I'll tell you how Dick Shawn died.
Hey eddie, that was the best post you ever did in my years of web surfing!
ReplyDeletePC